The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

The easiest and most widely accepted explanation for my mother’s strange disappearance was madness—the same affliction to befall every woman in my family for as far back as anyone could remember. We were cursed—the Farrow women.

I suspected that the ache of missing her would mostly come from those little things. The holes that were left behind, empty places I’d stumble upon now that she was gone.

It was a strange piece of jewelry that most closely resembled a watch. But the numbers were off-kilter, some of them missing. Ten and eleven were gone, and a zero stood in place of the twelve. The hands never moved, two of them perpetually stuck on the one, the other two pointing to nine and five. The numbers that were scratched from the mother-of-pearl surface could still be seen if I tilted it toward the light, a defect that Gran didn’t know the origin of.

No one in Jasper had ever seen me as normal because my grandmother had never been normal. She’d never believed she was sick, either, saying that she was simply in two places at once.

But that ache inside of me wasn’t just the pain of losing her. It was the relief, too, and that was something else I’d never said aloud. In those last years, Gran had all but lived inside of her own broken mind, shut away from our world for weeks at a time. It was one thing to miss her when she was gone. It was another to miss her when she was still here, in this house with me. For the last few months, I’d found myself longing for the end as much as I’d dreaded it.

the irrefutable part of this was that people couldn’t just travel through time. I’m not sick, honey. I’m just in two places at once.

I could feel the vision pulling at me, like I was teetering with one foot in this moment and one in another. Like I was standing in two places at once.

“But you’re a Farrow, June. This place is as much yours as it is mine, even if you’ve ended up on the wrong end of time.”

“I honestly don’t know how it began. My mother told me what her mother told her—that any woman in our bloodline will see that door at one point or another, and eventually, she’ll walk through it.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you were six years old or if you were eighty. We’re like moths to the flame, and once you cross, it begins.” “What begins?” “The fraying.”

Time is like a rope, made of many fibers, and when they’re bound up together, they make one strong timeline.”

“But once you cross it, it begins to fray. Those fibers loosen. Unwind. Eventually, they are bound to unravel. Then you don’t have one timeline anymore.” Two places at once. Two times at once. “So, they’re real? The things I’m seeing and hearing?” She nodded. “They’re just parallel threads.”

“So, you’re…?” “Sick? It has nothing to do with being sick. It’s more like having two sets of eyes, one that sees this world and one that sees the other. Eventually, they start bleeding into each other, and that’s where the madness lies.” “But how do you stop it?” “You can’t. The door appears to the Farrow women, and at one point or another, they will walk through it. And once you’ve crossed, your mind never fully crosses back.”

“The only thing I really know about you, June—” My fingernails bit my palms. “Is that I never really knew you at all.”

This was the field that I had planted. With my very own hands. And then I’d left it all to rot.

How could I have done it? This perfect creature would wither and fade, and it occurred to me all at once that maybe that’s exactly why I had left. Maybe I was afraid to watch the consequences unfold. Maybe I’d been running from this, from her, when I went back through that door.

I couldn’t stop thinking that where we stood was the center of something, a place that created the kind of gravity that made galaxies.

it was a memory I didn’t have yet. That’s what this felt like, inheriting moments until they made an entire reality. Bit by bit, I was getting pieces. If that was true, then eventually, I would feel as if I’d lived this life. I’d recapture it, in a way.

“You may have ruined my life, June. But first, you gave me one.”

“Listen to me.” He took my face in his hands, the timbre of his voice deepening. “I wouldn’t change any of it. If I could walk through a door and undo all of this, I wouldn’t. Do you understand?” I stared at him, afraid to speak. “You and Annie are the loves of my life,” he breathed. “And I wouldn’t change

She was a prism that colored me and my world with a story. We were the limbs of a broken tree with poisoned roots.

The curse on the Farrows had broken the natural laws of the world, and with it had come so much suffering. But in this, there’d been the most unexpected of gifts.

We stood there, four generations of Farrow women, cursed to live between worlds. But in that moment, in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we existed only in one.